Action Steps Relaunched!

Lego Pen I Bought. Has nothing to do With This Post. Sorry.

Once again, and still in beta, its the action steps! This year I am going to make posts on the action I take and place a bookmark in the action step page, instead of writing it as one big section.

Since I am personally restarting this year, I am going to start off with a very similar theme from last year. Just bear with me for a few weeks while I get things kick started again, if your a previous reader of the action steps. I am also in the process of building up things again, too. I am personally a bit more prepared this year, than the last to have the guts to dip into the unknown and take some action.
My plan is to have a normal post and an action step post, so the action steps will not ever replace a normal post for the week. Some weeks will not have an action step, since some steps may take several weeks, or even a month.

The First Action Step- Make a Decision To Change
Believe it or not, you have something to the tune “when such and such event happens, I will start an [insert industry] business.” Quite frankly, events are never perfect. The savings are missing a few thousands, or you haven’t won the lottery. The tax return is less than expected, the kids haven’t left the house(yet) or you haven’t have the money for a new computer for the past 3 years. Reality is these things 80% of the time are excuses to non-commitment. It is protection from failing. Put all these setbacks aside for now, and just say Im going to start a small business and grow it into another and then into investments.

The first way to commit is by taking some action everyday, and not just making a verbal commitment. While it helps to have an commitment written down as a statement, you need to back up that statement by taking the time out to learn, to execute and maintain about your select business. Since learning is the first and the easiest, commit about 15 minutes a day, or more. Then in 3 or so months, when your brain is stuffed, its time to put what you learned into action. Then maintain your action by having yourself complete a task or two, to make sure your not giving up or stagnating.

How did I do this step?
I made my commitment on paper. I wrote it up in OpenOffice.org(I use to work in Ubuntu Linux, but right now Im trying out OpenSuse, if you must know) and printed one copy on some resume paper, and one on copy paper. I signed both of them, making it look like a contract. The nice one was hanged on a board. I recommend using a cheap frame if you wish to make it stand out more. I try to read it everyday before work, to remind myself. I do take a lot of my learning to print, since I am not allowed a laptop at work. During breaks, I read whatever I printed out. I also use the same time to figure out a to do, and I keep it to less than 3 a day. Sometimes I break a task down further what the goal is, and the tools I need to complete the task. Name of the game for a cheap startup is momentum. You have to keep moving or else you will get bored and do something else.
Next Week, I will post another action step, covering more about learning and cash stuff. So stay tuned. I am Also going to leave up the previous actions step page till the then, to give you some time if you wish to save yourself a copy.

 

How To Be Lazy And Fail By Following Your New Year’s Resolutions

A Rant that left my keyboard..in a nice condition

It’s a new year, which means seeing the gyms packed, people speed walking in black sauna suits on the sidewalks, SlimFast being bought in large amounts, and the self help sections in bookstores being camped out by customers. In a few weeks the gyms will be hardly busy, the sauna suits, get replaced by moms wearing sweatsuits pushing strollers, and co-workers lighting up cigarettes will remove the nicotine patches for the duration of their smoke break. All of this just because tax season came around to fill them with the stress of getting a return, instead of owing the government money. Okay, well that isn’t the reason why of course, its because their resolutions had no staying power and with the weather being cold, no one has the need to look good in a swimsuit.

I bet, like me you might of made some business resolutions too. Like to finally start one, save more cash, or join some program. I am the master of non-committing startups(this maybe being the 6th year in a row not doing anything) so I can say what will keep your wealth dreams from ever happening by following these steps to just appear like…your on your way. Just like Any other resolution.

Step One – Take only action when you reach x amount of savings-Quite frankly, waiting around for the cash means that cash isn’t being put aside in the first place. The concept of Pay yourself first, means buying what you want, pay your bills, and then save.

Step Two – Sit around, another year researching the next big thing, within the big things(insert your favorite category, investments, real estate, or internet businesses) trying to figure out one requires the least amount of thought and action-This one easy to do, since new programs come out all the time. Plus it’s a lot of work researching all these websites, forums, and periodicals, for this advice, enough that you feel like you’re creating a business in the process.

Step Three-Joining several of these programs you researched, look at the information, decide its not what you thought it would be, and join another one covering almost the same exact material in the previous one did and still decide you cannot do it-This will leave you in a endless researching loop, making you look even busier and you’re spending your cash, so you must be getting somewhere, with your new knowledge you keep

Step Four-Over analyze everything, becoming busy going thru the details, and when it doesn’t exactly turn out just perfect, freak out, and give up.

Step Five-once again, don’t work on your business ever, because Researching is busy work worth pursing. Just keep at finding more and more details, till you decide you can get, more research done. Knowledge is power, right?

So enough of this attempt of satire. What does it really take?

Time-Even if you can commit 15 do it. But you will only get 15 minutes worth of results at first. When you reach a different level, its probably a different story. Make the day count by doing really what needs to be done. The rest can be wasted on twitter, blogging, or researching. These things are easier to do since you know how to do them already, the important task is unknown territory you need to spend that time on.

Money – Actively set aside money to invest in your business. I am going go against the flow and say your education isn’t in the same budget. Its easy to spend money on a book or on a real estate program. But its hard to spend money on a google ad, a website host or pressing the buy button in your investment account. Emotionally draining and scary at first to be exact. Your dollars matter more when risk is in play. And education is a small risk compared to working. Let what you learn work, even if it doesn’t hold all the answers. It really never does.

Faith-You will have failures. Big time failures. You’re going to  lose out while reality trains you that what is the correct or incorrect way to do somethings. But keep at refining, investing and trying to produce some good results.

I am the one who didn’t follow this advice. 2008 ended up being bad, because of it. Very much so till the very end of it. But sadly most of it wasn’t because I followed this advice, its because I choose to really focus on what didn’t bring results. And its more expensive too, because I put all my research and money that I spent on programs(some which cost month to month) aside. And all it would have taken was a try at using what I learned.

So to sum it up, the big three items into a resolution you can use is – Conqueror the unknown by constantly moving. That the only Resolution you really need this year if you need one.

 

A Late Reminder to Interact

Its is more by far a media producers, than media consumers world these days. People write blogs, produce videos on YouTube, and share other media works like photos or a useful shell script. People are getting more active, than ever before, and the consequences of this is good. Its not a taboo to teach another even if themselves are not a master(myself included). YouTube proves this often.  I saw a small lesson on  learning Arabic and a person complained that a newbie shouldn’t be teaching, this due to her ability to not  pronounce some words correctly, even if she admits it. The true reality is this – its better to provide a seed, to plant an interest, than it is to expect someone to suddenly only teach when they have bloomed already.  By  becoming active in the learning process , by teaching a skill to someone, even if incomplete, you end up learning more. One way is by comments on how to suggestions how to do something correctly.

Is it time to get public with your exploits? I think so. Why would you want to? To build a support group mostly. One of the keys to self improvement is to surround yourself with other successful, or wanting to succeed, like-minded individuals. By contributing information, and getting comments, like “keep up the good work”, or “awesome”, and “this video sucks,”(whoops! thats not suppose to be there!) you get the feed back you need to fill yourself with to keep on going.

Most books that cover this tidbit, make it sound like you just suddenly have it happen as more and more your exploits attract the attention of others. But reality is, you have to work for your fans. Blogging exposed this to me a bit. For example, for traffic, you just don’t throw a post up with reverent tags and then hope for traffic. No, I have to work by going to forums, or being part of some group, and interact with others, and someone might click on my signature link. I brought more people to my blog that way than just tagging.
Its really time consuming, and I can always do more, but for now I hope to benefit my core niche a bit with what I have currently(I hope).
Find ways to work for your customers/audience, and if your consistantly give them wat info nuggets they need, over time, they might return a favor with a sale or a nugget of info you need. Utopian? A bit, I admit. But it works, and thats all that matters.

An Update Note on Action Steps
Once again, I am reworking the action step section on my blog. I have let it slip to inactivity while I was lazy, and now when I am working on my business much more. Mostly, I am thinking about creating a whole blog about it, where I have nearly a post per week covering each of the steps in detail, but I have to build up the articles first before I attempt to do that. So right now its the early phases of being redone. Last time I got stuck on the muse part, since thats what I’m currently working on, and really didn’t have a game plan. Now, I think I have a bit of an idea what my muse goals should be. So sometime in September, or so, I will have some idea to do with that section. Till then hold tight, and I apologize for the time delay. I want to let my business dictate the direction of things, instead of just picking stuff by theory, which wouldn’t be as relevant. I will not be taking the section down for the time being, since there really no appealing reason to.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: seo, internet interaction, web promotion, internet promotion, home business promotion, action steps to building a home business

 

Muse Start-up(Sorry For The Hibernation)

Let me start off by explaining why I haven’t written for 2 weeks. I’ve been tired, doing probably one of the dumbest things when your trying to just create a new income- start a diet and exercise regime. Starting 2 lifestyle changes at the same time, is quite possibly the dumbest thing you can do. So start one, then once one of the changes is in maintenance mode, follow with the next.

In the opening of my muse, you would think their would be much work to do, things to be busy with and so on.

The start-up of my muse(an affiliate marketing business, the easiest route) , was a task that lasted less than a hour. I have semi-planned by having a list of programs and the places I was going to sell ad time on, which is Google( adsense) at this time, maybe others later such as Yahoo or MSN. I then clocked out after an hour and spent the rest of the evening watching a movie with my Wife.

I imagine more tasks that could take place if you were to incorporate, which would go even with the amount of fanfare as above! Since you can use one of the e-Providers, without really talking to a lawyer(I would feel personally, this would be a better route, for documenting reasons if you were to file for a C corporation). This go around(and I might shooting myself in the foot) I am not spending the cash on a creation of a business entity, such as a LLC. I will later in about 3 months when I can afford it(about $300 dollars, to do it right) and the tax reasons to do so. Transferring should be to complicated.

In other startup activities, I bought a new task chair. There goes something a tax ride off would of been useful for. But since its more as much for personal computing and business activities, oh well. My butt and back feel ten times better than from my previous chair.

With all of this about my startup(finally) in mind, with the start of my first business I’m going to need an opinion. Write about it separately from this blog, do I stay committed to a more general topic range, Or could I just mix and match? Your Option does matter, so leave a comment!

 

Rebuilding Your Finances, For The New Year

I have a confession to make. I decided to redo my entire opinion regarding personal finance structuring, from what I was trying to accomplish last time. Turned out to be more complicated, than it really needed to be. So with the new

year started, I decided to turn to help, re-reading some material I had on the matter, and follow the advice. Some things still apply from my first go around:

no budgeting. Our goal is to expand revenue to support our lifestyle, not create a lifestyle defined by limits of a budget or as a employed salaried worker. At the same time you must become numbers aware. What does that mean? You must have a sense of how much is going where, and why, and have every

expenditure, every purchase, etc. have a sense of purpose. The sense needs to be highly tuned, or else, you might dig your head in the sand, ignoring your poor financial problems that might develop.

To help develop this sense, it helps to start learning some basic bookkeeping.

So, sitting down with my wife, we discussed some of the new habits that need to be developed. The habit one, is keeping track of what it spent on. It doesn’t matter at first, your goal isn’t to become a tightwad, its to just get a feel what being spent and where.

So, using a small pad, every time cash is spent, its written down in a simple format. Amount, where, and for what. At the end of the day, the transactions are then totaled or written into a Ledger. While a finance program can take care of this, they do take a bit of a learning curve, if you never used one. I am learning using gnu cash; Quicken(the king at least on Windows) or moneydance(written in java, it can be run on any operating system) are also great application that can be used instead. For now, the numbers are being ran on paper and on the computer.

My screenshot of learning about setting up Gnucash, late at night.

Books for your personal accounts should be kept separate from your business accounts.

You should take it even further. Instead of taking the amount you get back after taxes, and other auto deductions from your paycheck, you should take the revenue, and subtract it yourself. Its supposedly how businesses operate, so its a good habit to learn. The idea behind it is when you have a legal entity such as a chapter C corporation, or a LLC, they pay taxes after money been spent, not before.

Once you start seeing where your cash is going, its time to introduce the concept of paying yourself first- the second habit. This is where you take 10% of your cash(monthly, weekly, or every paycheck whatever easier), and put it into an investment. Notice the keyword- investment. Your not taking cash to save it, the purpose is for investing our first small venture, the muse. The good news is this doesn’t take much cash. A muse can be started with little less than 500 dollars. If your living paycheck to paycheck, its hard to probably get a saving account with 500 dollars, so thats why its good to start now. I used an online bank, and using direct deposit from work, every paycheck about 100 dollars goes into that account. Some places I recommend is HSBC direct and ING direct. Both are designed to be used with a traditional checking account somewhere else. The accounts allow small balances can be started with as little cash as you have(I signed on using 10 dollars, really I did!) and carry no fees for having little cash in them. Once the muse is started, the saving account ends up taking on a different role. Thats for another time and day.

Two very simple, and powerful habits worth starting.

 

Personal Update

I have officially nearly killed my wrists and nearly broke off my fingers while playing with my new toy- Guitar Hero III. While those body parts healed, I spent some time watching the mac world keynote. I really like the MacBook Air, but looking at the keyboard makes my hands hurt(GH3 influenced). Some side info- I own one of the newer Apple’s keyboards, they have a short throw(quick to click buttons, I assume you call it that), which is good for gaming, but bad for steady typing. I destroy my hand quickly on them, I guess because I’m use to pressing a bit longer on other keyboards.

I’ve been slowly rebuilding the action step page. While I’m a bit behind in writting them, I am far down the line. Im in the middle of building my first business or “muse” and its slowly getting worked on. What mostly holding me back is my savings,which isn’t at the level yet to begin. I should be up and running by the end of January(my self imposed deadline).

The third action step is about setting up your finances, goes up tomorrow. Along with it, I will post an deeper article to go along with it.

Stay tuned!

 

The New Action Steps, Summarized

I decided there are four or five so phases, that a person must do in order to succeed. Previously, I made our action steps into one phase and as I started to break it down, it seemed to make very little sense. I admit , some of these steps are not original; there just no reason to reinvent the wheel when some ideas just work great. These steps start out from nothing, and begin to build out into becoming a millionaire. The steps are not that far along yet, since I’m writing them as I go. I also generalized a few steps, because the type of business you create, might not be right for me, but perfect for you. Without further adieu, here are the new action steps:

Phase 1: Personal commitment and change.

action step 1- make a decision to change.

decide your ready to change your financial situation. even if you don’t know how.

action step 2- begin a audit of your finances.

create a balance sheet. See how you are, and how you want it to really look like.

action step 3- Research systems.

search blogs, books, and other media, to see whats out there. An idea will stick out, or a system matching your skills(somewhat). Research what you know, and what you don’t. Continue to do this till the beginning of phase 3(about no more than 4 months, if you can read more than several sources per month)

Phase 2: Build your wealth building blocks

Wealth action one- Begin saving 10% of your take home income, into a saving account. This is to fund our creation of our first small business or “muse”.

Wealth action two- decide to yourself to grow by not saving, but to grow by creating assets and business.

Saving into millions is possible, but its for those who cannot grow assets, like we are determined to do. Your savings is to help bootstrap, not to create money by interest, or dividends.

Wealth action three- don’t worry, be systematic.

You dont need a budget, you just need to figure out how much things really cost., and be aware. Write down exactly what you want, for your wants and plan buying them. If you want “open” style buys, figure out before you search what your limit.

Phase 3 business: muse creation plus cash machine(in construction)

Business step one- create the company, give your company a name, even if you don’t know hat your doing yet.

business step two- Stop research, Begin your business.

Don’t spend too much time on trying to find a solution, its now about correct effort, leadership and discipline.

business step 2.1- create your “muse” a small business to create leverage int your first cash machine(your real first business).

This is to gain basic marketing and selling skills, plus to help form a new mindset, into a real business. So call it a hobby business, its design to be cheap and possibly built under 500-2000 dollars.

Business step three- create your business positions.

define your role with each one, create a flow chart, decide on what each position main responsibility is.

Business step 4- transfer cash from savings and funnel into muse.

My muse took not much capital to begin, spend cash on cheap ads, and marketing. Muses are quick, and can turn around in weeks.

business step five- unknown at this step. Under construction

 

Weekly Dump List and Hierarchy Chart Update

While I’m cooking up an article and some progress, here some stuff to read over the week.

Good article for time saving for bloggers

Fun Article- but interesting for social reasons.(LUG nerds auction)

How to not multitask

How to write down your goals

Continuously Increase Productivity by Embracing the Optimization Mentality

Notice: Im going to redo the action steps. I am currently entirely rewriting them. I decided that a few things really need to be in correct order. Sorry for the mess up. For now thou, I’m going to keep action step section of my blog open, till some progress is made.

Personal Hierarchy Chart Update

As per recommended by the book, E-Myth, I did my chart using a open-source program in Linux called Labyrinth Maps. Its a mind mapping program, but it suits the basic diagramming I need for this process. So I created several blocks, and in these blocks I named off positions for my company in order to stay afloat. I then proceeded to fill in every position with my name(how egoistical is that?) and what the position main duty is. I haven’t yet created performance agreements for each position(which would be the next step). This would be wise to do if you have a partner in your business. Right now, My wife isn’t part of my business operations, due to lack of time, so thats another person that might fill some spots in. It seems a bit silly to do so, but it makes the business more systematic than just doing it all and then later trying to fill these rolls with other when, if ever you get employees or a outsourced individual(s). Making a goal to have employees, is a great one to have, so you can start becoming an owner, not the self-employed worker. It also makes you concentrating how you can create your job to be re-doable by the staff you will hire by creating a system for it right down to the nitty-gritty details to what way your name tag should be placed.

If you need some help with positions here are some to think about- President, Vice-President, Sales Manager, Payroll, Bookkeeper and Human Resources. You could break it down even further to salesman and general labor(i.e: bag sacker, attendant, shipping clerk or personal assistant) if its called for. Go ahead and have some serious fun with this. Its cool to say, to yourself(but lets be honest, not to others) that I am President of my company – Positive Capitalism.

From here, if you haven’t yet decided on what to make your money in, now would be a good time.

Its now time for me to realize, I own a business and it needs to conduct business. Whatever holding you back, who cares, just keep in mind you need to conduct business or your business will fail now and I don’t want this to happen. It would make it a rather boring blog too. I know it seems like to some the moment you want to launch, you can’t because your car needs to be fixed or someone stole your wallet, or some other life threating event. Balance it out and still give yourself some time to dedicate to your business, even if it only 15 minutes a week.

Up next: real business work, not busy work. I am working on a 2 part series regarding what can keep you going and what real motivation works. A lot of what I read, needs to be used in the tested in the trenches as I go about working, so I’m going to see what really works, without saying this idea works, when it really doesn’t. Until then, stay classy..planet..earth.

 

Back in Action

Now that my internet access is back after a month of having basic email and light reading access, I can get back to moving ahead again. Moving To a new apartment and the loss of Marilee job, has eaten up my light savings. So, I must now bring it up back to speed. While that happening, I’ve had some good time reading up on some things.

Its time to build a foundation for our business, even if we don’t know what to sell or create yet. Some quick machines that you can start to build a real cash machine, might be in order(even if this goes against one guru ideas) Im thinking about internet marketing, since the startup is less than one week, and about 100-260 in startup cost(95% Mostly advertising costs). Then from there, a better muse/cash machine can traditionally be built with relative ease. The marketing part that kind of business is a skill worth learning anyways.

But, let me backtrack a bit and create our organization, by creating a flow chart of hierarchy , as recommend by Micheal Gerber in his book- E-Myth Revisited(not a affiliate link). To really become a business owner, a person must be able to take themselves systematically and slowly off the hierarchy chart. By creating systems, and procedures, regarding what works, you can take a business to where its not just another job, it can be taken over by other just as well as you can do it. Book after book talks about this, Hint, hint!

My homework is to re-read chapter 14 of E-Myth Revisited, to build this business hierarchy. While it talks about how they do searching on the product they wish to create, Im going to ignore this.Also I need to list my personal skills. This is for later on when Im building my cash machine. Skills should be thought beyond what you do at work. For example, just because you are in Security(like me) Doesn’t mean that the only skills I have. Example, I can use power tools, and decorate. So I have some handy man and interior decoration skills right there. So, always look beyond work.

Next update? When I feel like writing as it goes now. Might be a article dump or something

 

Some Boring, but Needed Steps

I know what we are mostly doing is pretty much basic knowledge and these are some boring tasks, but they will seem to help out with the bootstrapping. Plus, it will help jump start any wealth building system. Mostly it to help remove the rose-colored glasses towards your money. Is it to start a budget or anything? Heck no. Its more for gaining insight, if anything, and the more the better!

1) Get your credit report. go to www.annualcreditreport.com and request one from one of the reporting credit agencies. If you wish, Do just one agency now, and one in about 3-4 months. Your allowed one free report(one per agency) per year. This will let you figure out what debt you have(and sometime tend to ignore). Don’t worry heavily about what you find out. As long as your committed to creating wealth, you can pay it off.
2)Figure out your pre-tax earnings per month. You pull this from your W-2 tax form if your employed.
3)Figure your bills, for ones that are floating(such as long distance, and utilities) just average realistically what you pay.
4) Floating costs, like gas, groceries, eating out, and other entertainment are sometimes hard to figure out since they vary month to month. For us, we just recently started shopping at a different grocery store, and the savings been quite substantial for buying meat. So, you take your bills for this past month, and your after tax spending, and minus the the bills. Go with that for now.
5) Write up anything you built up in savings, broker accounts, and 401k. That your Assets.
6) At this time go ahead and start narrowing your focus to a wealth system. I picked Loral Langemeier book, The Millionaire Maker for mine(aff links). Some others might be Robert Allen Multiple streams of income, David Bach Automatic Millionaire. Rich Dad, Poor Dad is more of a thinking, not a system. Do not go off doing it just yet, its just time to start setting your focus.

Why are we grabbing all this garbage? Next step I’m going to be building our income, p/l statements, in the next action step. That way we can see what can be done to bootstrap with.